Barn sale tradition continues in Dublin

"You can find old stuff and brand new stuff," said antique collector Amy Lowell of Greenfield at the decades-old barn sale Saturday.

She and her partner, Rick Wible, have had a booth at the barn sale for the past seven years.

"The problem is we make money and we turn around and spend it on something else," Lowell said laughing.

It's also a time for visiting with friends, Wible said.

"What we like about (the Yankee Barn Sale) is the number of people that come through," Lowell said.

First-timer Ryan Lerch of Portsmouth was in the area for a flight lesson when he spotted the sale. It's an event he has always wanted to attend, he said.

"I came to buy some trinkets and I walk away with, how long is this, this four-foot long military hardware," he said.

Lerch, a military buff, bought a 120 millimeter artillery shell from Wible.

"I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with it, or where I'm going to put it, or why I bought it," he said smiling, indicating he's still very much a satisfied customer.

Yankee Publishing employee Linda Clukay has been organizing the barn sale for the past 23 years.

"It started 32 years ago. It actually started way, way back when we had our own in-house book publishing division," she said.

The in-house public relations department came up with the idea of having a sale on a field owned by the company on Route 101 to sell gently-used books that had been returned by book stores. They also invited residents to hold a town-wide yard sale.

Clukay has worked for Yankee since 1966 and has been a switchboard operator, receptionist and jack of all trades.

She took over running the barn sale in 1990 after the company downsized, closing the in-house publishing and the public relations departments.

Yankee Publishing no longer has surplus books to sell, but still gives residents a free space to sell treasures from their attics, and charges out-of-towners and antique dealers a fee for a space.

"We consider it a multi-family yard sale," Clukay said.

In the tradition of allowing a local nonprofit to raise money selling lunch, Cocker Spaniel Rescue of New England ran the food booth Saturday.

"It's a great community event. And it's like old home day, you see people you don't see the whole rest of the year, but you run into just about everybody here," Clukay said.